Interesting times in Mexico

I came back from Mexico on Monday (stuck in the USA for an extra day, due to the weather - but every year they get ice storms and snow, so you wonder why they did not prepare).
But Mexico was interesting. I had never been there before, but I love Mexican food (and it was much better in place). What you do not realize, sitting here half a planet away, is how much regional variation there is in Mexico. And how cold it was in Yucatan in winter - just like, as I keep telling my friends, Swedish summer.
What was most fascinating, however, was Cancun itself. There was nothing but a beach and some Mayan ruins there 40 years ago. Now, there is a city (with rather bad traffic), overpriced restaurants, and hundreds of timeshare units. There must have been a terrific boom there, and they did not always make the best of it (you could hardly walk along the beach - too many hotels had build all the way down to the sand).
The second interesting thing was that there were so many mexican tourists there. Now you may say "of course, this was Mexico, right?". But it is too expensive for ordinary Mexicans. Rich Mexicans go to Europe on vacation, but usual people can not afford that. Before, they could not afford going to Cancun either. But now, the hotel owners had probably realized that it was better to have some people in the hotel than nobody (you could see how empty it was). If Americans were not coming (and they were not), and Europeans did not know they could go (the peso was cheaper than the dollar, so it was not expensive for those who own euro), so how do you get customers? Market in Mexico City.
They were not alone in doing that. I only understand a little Spanish, but I got the TV commercials with the tourist minister of Panama. Go there, see the crocodiles and the jazz festival while you play golf. Maybe I did not get all of it.
Another interesting thing is how badly the Internet worked. It was a long time since I actually noticed the latency in the connection. But even if the local connectivity was OK, you could tell that the pipe to the north was not wide enough. I guess they did not expect people to work in a place which is mostly beach, but I had to. The latency was particularly noticeable when trying to get web pages, and it was horrible when you tried to use an IP phone (I got it in my computer, but I think I need to have a word with the programmers). You could not use it reliably - the bandwidth was OK, but the latency was too long. Streaming worked, but that is just because buffering is OK. I was listening to the NPR Planet Money webcast - if you are not an economist, try it, they do a fantastic job. If you are, you will learn something anyway.
But why am I telling you this? First, because of the Panamanian tourist minister. There are clusters emerging when people start being able to afford travelling (even if the reason is that the prices go down, since they hotels have to fill the rooms). Those clusters do not necessarily look like we, who come from one particular culture, think. Of course it is easier for Spanish speakers to go to other Spanish-speaking countries. I wonder where the biggest tourist destinations in the big cultural/language spheres will be. Cancun is probably a good bet, actually - because of the Mayan ruins, and the great airport. It less far to Colombia than to Canada from there, after all.
Second, the Internet. I wonder if it would have worked better if I tried to access Colombian and Venezuelan web pages? And where does latencies longer than two seconds leave Web 2.0?